Barnes & Noble Inc.

Several blogs were reporting this morning on Barnes & Noble’s announcement that it will sell the Nook in the UK this fall, marking the first time in its 95-year-history that it has ever expanded overseas. But, as this article on Paid Content points out, it may be too little, too late:

“Kindle has already been in the U.K. for two years and recently partnered with British bookstore chain Waterstone’s to sell Kindles in its stores. Rakuten’s Kobo is already in the U.K., too, and both companies are expanding rapidly to other countries."

Add another happy beneficiary of the publishing powerhouse “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Barnes & Noble.

Sales of the erotic trilogy, which has dominated paperback and e-book best-seller lists for most of the year, along with the liquidation of the Borders chain in 2011, helped lift comparable bookstore sales in the fiscal first quarter at Barnes & Noble by 4.6 percent, the company said on Tuesday.

It was the end of the summer of 2010, and I bumped into Karen Pokras Toz at a party. “I’ve been looking all over for you!” she said excitedly. “I have big news to tell you! I wrote a book!” 

Three and a half years ago, I had an e-reader unwillingly thrust upon me.  I ignored it at first; shunned it.  Then one day I was packing for a long trip and it came on me in a flash that if I used the damned thing I wouldn’t have to limit myself to five pounds of books in my luggage. Since then I read more ebooks than physical books. I buy a lot more books, too. Last year I noticed that books were getting cheaper, but the writing was getting worse.

Barnes & Noble announced today that it would cut the prices on both the Nook Tablet and the Nook Color e-reader. Beginning this week, the 16GB Nook Tablet will sell for $199, down from $249; the 8GB model, meanwhile, goes from $199 to $179. As for the Nook Color, which has always straddled the middle ground between tablet and plain old e-reader, expect to pay $149.

With U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote expected to rule on a proposed ebook pricing settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice and three publishers by the end of August, Judge Cote confirmed that Apple may provide a further five-page objection by August 15.

Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have agreed to settle in response to the DOJ’s allegations that they colluded with Apple to fix ebook prices.

Amazon is a case of mysterious and magical realism. I find myself inside a coterie of near certifiable money managers and analysts who believe Amazon is a “creative destruction” operator, hell bent on transforming retailing and book publishing, and likely to emerge as the Wal-Mart of the Internet. The Amazon story is about scale and momentum in general merchandise sales, here and abroad. I don’t care how many Kindles they deliver or their burgeoning downloads in books, music, video games and streaming of films.

It looks like all those avowed Kindle fanatics might be going through ink withdrawal -- or so says a new report funded by a few titans of old media. The report, published last week by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), found that fewer consumers are purchasing books exclusively in electronic formats, while the number of booklovers who have "no preference" for e-books over print books is increasing. The percentage of e-book consumers who purchased books "exclusively or mostly" in e-book formats has decreased from 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012.

E-book consumers are becoming more diverse in their format preferences, says the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)'s closely-watched Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading report. The third installment in Volume Three of this Bowker-powered study shows that the percentage of e-book consumers who exclusively or mostly purchase book content in e-book format has decreased from nearly 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012. Over the same period, the percentage of survey respondents who have no preference for either e-book or print formats, or who buy some genres in e-book format and others in print, rose from 25 percent to 34 percent. The study also tracks changes in device ownership, showing that Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has overtaken Apple's iPad among e-book consumers for the first time. Ownership of the Kindle Fire has grown from seven percent of respondents in December 2011 to 20 percent just six months later. Apple's iPad has remained static at 17 percent over the same time period.

When the news of the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Apple and five of the nation’s largest book publishers became public earlier this spring, it took many by surprise. The suit accused Apple and the publishers of illegally colluding to resist Amazon’s aggressive strategy of pricing many new and bestselling books at $9.99 — well below the prices charged for hardcover copies and below what many in the industry say it costs to produce those volumes. The popular conception of an antitrust suit involves the government going after…